


Illumination

by openhearts



Category: Bones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, The Glowing Bones in the Old Stone House
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-19
Updated: 2009-07-19
Packaged: 2018-08-14 03:11:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7996447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openhearts/pseuds/openhearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(originally posted at LiveJournal)</p>
<p>Cooking isn’t about physics, it’s about love. That’s what it’s really about, Miss Doctor Lady. And I’m gonna show you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Illumination

**Author's Note:**

> Eeek!  This is the first thing I've really written in the Bones fandom.  I must thank [](http://britishwannabe1.livejournal.com/profile)[**britishwannabe1**](http://britishwannabe1.livejournal.com/)  for reading over the first draft and [](http://cardiogod.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://cardiogod.livejournal.com/)**cardiogod**  for her incredible patience and attention to detail in betaing this for me.

She had these brief, brilliant flashes of insight. Every one usually prompted some step, some break; something that felt frightening and unnatural. It was all short bursts of light before more darkness, but during a moment like this she felt she could make out just enough to take a step ahead into the spontaneously-returning black.

 

Carly seemed to move perpetually in those bursts of light. She had a floodlight on her at all times, running confidently into everyone who she cared about. At first Temperance had found her fascinating, engaging. She had found herself drawn to the woman’s fierceness and skill, and even her hyperbole. 

 

(Cooking isn’t about physics, it’s about love. That’s what it’s really about, Miss Doctor Lady. And I’m gonna show you.)

 

A brief flash. A short burst of light.

 

_

 

 

The investigation all but extinguished the inexplicable feeling of lightness Temperance had felt around Carly. Her husband was a cuckolded alcoholic. Their relationship was an ever boiling-over thing, not the supposedly sustaining force everyone seemed to believe marriage to be. 

 

Booth talked about how love was somehow beyond science and research, its effects unable to be explained by her methods. He said that like it was a good thing, like the mystery of it made it somehow better and truer. 

 

Temperance extracted luminescent bones from flesh, catalogued injuries, watched Angela and Hodgins try to navigate their relationship. Every detail about this case struck her as monumentally important and she had trouble processing it all. She was fearful of what piece of evidence would turn up next to dispel more of the positive feelings she’d had about the victim . . . about herself, and what new facts were hiding in Carly’s promises of food being the key to love and happiness.

 

It didn’t appear to her that love had done anything good for these people; for Carly or Angela. They both used some different value scale than she did, clearly.  Science would catch the killer. Detachment would preserve her friend’s autonomy. 

 

But Carly smiled in the pictures on her webpage when she hugged her husband. Angela smiled when she talked about Hodgins, her not-but-maybe-husband.

 

_

 

 

She couldn’t stop from suddenly blurting things about herself to Booth in the car: that she wasn’t cold, that she needed the kind of love Angela and Hodgins experienced so easily, regardless of the definition of their relationship.   

 

There were things she knew, things she felt, that she didn’t know how to express verbally. It came out anyway, sounding, in effect like she was speaking with a heavy accent in a foreign language.

 

“Did I make you uncomfortable?”

 

He turned sharply, eyes off the road. “No.” 

 

He said it like he was declaring something important. Promising something. Revealing something. Something.

 

She was quiet the rest of the way.

 

_

 

 

She watched Carly’s best friend fidget uncontrollably and break into anguished sobs while Booth very quietly laid out the events of the night of Carly’s death for her. She didn’t deny it. 

 

“Carly was my best friend. She was my best friend.”

 

It was dim in the room, shadows pulling away from the corners of everything and receding, unfeeling.

 

Temperance felt dark, and tired.

 

_

 

 

Cooking, according to Carly (and Booth), was about more than physics, it was about love. It was about memories, about things that were mutually felt and therefore understood without explanation. 

 

It was yet another thing that other people understood and talked about in a different language that didn’t relate to brain chemistry or elemental chemistry.

 

Temperance cooked. 

 

She filled a copper-bottomed pot with water, added salt, and put it over a burner turned on high to cause it to boil. 

 

She grated cheese (parmesan, cheddar, and mozzarella) for the pasta and chopped fresh herbs (parsley and basil) for the plates. 

 

She poured pasta into the water when it boiled; a shell-shaped variety she thought would retain the melted cheese well. 

 

She breathed in the thick scent when she mixed the still steaming pasta with the cheeses, and added nutmeg when it seemed a little flat.

 

(You just follow your instincts. You think about how it feels to look at someone you love, and you let your hands do what they wanna do.)

 

She put the mixture in the oven and baked it with more cheese sprinkled over the top, and more nutmeg, because it looked nice on top of the pasta.

 

When it was done, she took it out of the oven and served it to Booth, who seemed to genuinely enjoy it. 

 

She smiled when he smiled, and when she said, “Yeah, well you know, you have to eat, right?” he repeated her words, smiling some more. 

 

All signs, technically, that the meal had done what it was supposed to do: convey happiness and love. Signs that he should have understood, according to his belief that love speaks through obtuse signals and actions.

 

But all Booth did was smile and say thank you and get up to wash the dishes.

 

She stood at the entry to the kitchen, leaning aganst the island and rolling the last few drops of wine around the bottom of her glass. His back was to her where he stood at the sink. The fear and nervousness that had been building all night threatened to strangle her before she ever got the words out, she found herself speaking in spite of it. 

 

A brief flash. A short burst of light.

 

_

 

 

“Booth, do you believe what Carly said, that cooking is about love?”

 

He half-turned to her, catching her just from the corner of his eye for a moment before turning back to the sink.

 

“Sure, Bones. Y’know, when someone prepares a meal that they want you to enjoy, when you can count on those cookies or meatloaf, or whatever it is, it’s comforting. Don’t you remember your mom cooking for you when you were a kid?” 

 

As his warm voice spoke more words she could identify but not necessarily quantify, he turned off the water and began to rub soothing strokes over the dishes with a towel.

 

“I guess. I never really thought about it. I know my mother cooked for me and Russ, but there’s nothing particularly memorable about it.”

 

“Isn’t that what you were asking about?” 

 

“No.”

 

She breathed for a minute. She walked over to stand next to him at the counter and handed him the wineglass, eyes trained downward. He turned the water back on.

 

“Booth I’m talking about us.”

 

“Us?”

 

“You and me, Booth.” She watched him turning the glass over in his hands under the water, soap bubbles fading away over his skin.

 

“Like, _us_ us?” He turned and leaned against the sink, hands propped on the counter, towel slung over his shoulder. He was barefoot.

 

She didn’t know what repeated the word was supposed to convey. Aside from the raised intonation of his voice she couldn’t tell what the difference was. She looked away and repeated it in her mind: Us. _Us_.

 

She sighed in frustration, and shook her head. “I don’t know what that means.” She walked back over to the table and sat down.

 

Booth cocked his head to one side and regarded her for a few seconds. There was more, she knew it, but she couldn’t access it. She shrugged, feeling helpless. 

 

She wanted to just give up, tell Booth goodnight and sleep. Or give up, tell Booth goodnight and go to the lab and work. Or anything other than try to make him understand her. 

 

But she focused on him again, on his disbelieving half-smile. His shirt said _Don’t give up_. Big letters, right across the chest. Don’t give up.

 

Booth pulled the towel off his shoulder and laid it on the counter. He kept his head turned for a moment, and she followed his gaze to the dishes he’d just washed now resting in the drying rack.  He looked back at her.

 

Then Booth smiled a big bright smile that shied away to a grin a second later. He leaned himself up off the counter and walked over to her. She turned in her chair to face him as he sat back in his own chair, still pushed back from the table. He laughed a little, barely. His forearms rested on his thighs, hands hanging limp between his knees. His wide shoulders pitched forward, and the message on his t-shirt was wrinkled and garbled. He looked dazedly toward the floor for a few seconds.

 

And then he looked at her. And then it wasn’t dark anymore. 

 

“We’ll figure it out, Bones.”


End file.
